Accessible Tourism: New Directions and Opportunities

Colloquium
Marcus Hansen,  Alison Mc Intosh,  Brielle Gillovic,  Francisco Peco Torres,  Ana Isabel Polo Peña  

In light of the upcoming Handbook of Accessible Tourism (Hansen et al., 2025), this interdisciplinary special panel will present and address the crossroads within which accessible tourism in practice and research finds itself. We bring together scholars and practitioners to discuss the issues. Accessible tourism faces several key challenges to affecting real change in the industry and to gaining recognition in the scholarly debates of tourism studies. Accessible tourism tends to be viewed as a niche market. This is despite disabled people presenting the tourism industry with a sizeable market demographic worth over £274bn per year (Purple Pound, 2023). A shift needs to occur away from focus on legislation toward considering accessibility a customer service issue. From a research perspective, we have witnessed the growth of accessible tourism over the past two decades to becoming an established field within the tourism literature, as part of a wider social justice agenda. However, the field is now in need of new direction, lacking theoretical depth and repeating the same conclusions across various papers. These conclusions tend to focus on the need for increased awareness, more/better training etc. Yet, thus far concrete solutions remain elusive. How the industry, or indeed academia, should address these conclusions is unclear. Nevertheless, this presents accessible tourism scholars with several opportunities to pursue to deliver impactful change in industry and society as a whole.